Silver Bullet (1985)

Typically ragged on by most, I’ve always enjoyed this one and consider it to be one of the best of the many Stephen King books to screen flicks that came out in the eighties. For those of you who don’t know, “Silver Bullet” is based on the King novella “Cycle of the Werewolf” which depicted a small towns plight as with each passing full moon a werewolf terrorizes the locals. Corey Haim plays a crippled kid named Marty who has a close encounter with the beast and then tries to convince his older sister and drunken uncle (Garey Busey) that what he saw was real and, even more incredibly, he knows exactly who the creature is. “Silver Bullet” excels for one reason, and that is the relationships between Marty, his sister, and their Uncle Red. Busey is dead on as the well intentioned but always drunk uncle, and Haim along with actress Megan Follows as older sister Jane pull off a convincingly real brother-sister relationship. On the f/x side of things it’s mainly of the sub-par variety, with Carlo Rambaldi going the typical man-in-wolf suit route, but that’s ok. I’m not as picky as most, and sometimes a furry wolf suit with a zipper on the back will suit me just fine. Watch for the “werewolf congregation” scene and a nifty moment of suspense as our werewolf corners Marty on an old abandoned bridge. Good for a boring Saturday afternoon.